The content below was originally posted by Jean-Louis Marechaux in the DevOps Community here. We are re-running this post for better visibility to some amazing educational opportunities!

"About two years ago, we started the Learning Circles initiative to provide simple and structured educational material on some IBM Rational products. There are now 11 published Learning Circles that you can leverage for your own enablement, or for self-paced training in your organization.

To align the material with latest product releases, the CLM and the RTC Learning Circles have been recently updated. They now include specific material on CLM 5.0 (and even 5.0.2 for RTC).

Earlier this year (in 2014), we also worked with Scaled Agile Inc. to update the Agile Learning Circle and include a new roadmap on agility at scale with SAFe 3.0 (Scaled Agile Framework)

Visit the following Learning Circles and explore the Learning Roadmaps they contain:

CLM for App Dev: Get familiar with CLM capabilities and business value (IT domain)

IBM Rational Learning Roadmaps: An Overview- Everyone's busy. Because you may not have time to browse all the resources and mingle with other learners in one sitting, learning circles help you create your own personal roadmaps, your pathways through the resources. You can check off items as you complete them, break away whenever you need to, and easily return anytime. No guesswork; no wasted time trying to recreate where you were. You can keep your progress confidential, of course. But you also have the option of easily sharing your progress with a mentor, your manager, or your team so you can all progress together.

A developerWorks learning circle is a community space where people come together to learn about a subject. The learning circle offers targeted resources and guided learning activities, selected by subject matter experts, that you can use to build your personal learning roadmaps.

Darrel Rader, a technical skills and development leader in IBM Rational has built this amazingly short (only 6 slides!) but robust presentation on slideshare.net to help explain what learning circles are:

Now that you know what a learning circle is, did you know we've got five of them currently rolled out (with more to come)? Check out the great learning circles below, choose one, and dive in! These learning circles focus on aspects of the product and application lifecycle:

Because you may not have time to browse all the resources and mingle with other learners in one sitting, learning circles help you create your own personal roadmaps, your pathways through the resources.

You can check off items as you complete them, break away whenever you need to, and easily return anytime. No guesswork; no wasted time trying to recreate where you were.

You can keep your progress confidential, of course. But you also have the option of easily sharing your progress with a mentor, your manager, or your team so you can all progress together.